2010 Motion

On Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 4PM in Griffin 3, the following proposal to regularize Claiming Williams Day will be considered by the full faculty at their regular monthly faculty meeting.

Motion

We move that the first Thursday of each Spring semester be dedicated as Claiming Williams Day. The first class meeting of all Thursday Spring semester classes will occur on the Wednesday immediately preceding Claiming Williams Day. On Claiming Williams Day, no classes are held; all athletics practices (varsity, junior varsity, and club sport) will conclude no later than 9:00 am; and all students, faculty, and staff are invited to participate in the events of this community-building day.

In the relevant portion of the previously approved 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 calendars, “dead week” will be shorted by one day in order to insert into the Spring semester “Claiming Williams” day on February 3, 2011; February 2, 2012; and February 7, 2013.

This format of maintaining the standard length of Winter Study and shortening “dead week” by one day will be followed in ensuing years.

Claiming Williams Mission Statement

Claiming Williams invites the community to acknowledge and understand the uncomfortable reality that not all students, staff, and faculty can equally “claim” Williams. By challenging the effects of the College’s history of inequality that are based on privileges of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion, we will provoke individual, institutional, and cultural change.

Information from the Claiming Williams Steering Committee

We propose to dedicate the first Thursday of each Spring semester to Claiming Williams, an opportunity to come together as a community – faculty, students, staff, and administration – to assess critically our campus behaviors, as well as the values and standards that undergird them. Claiming Williams affirms the Williams Mission Statement that “free inquiry requires open-mindedness, and commitment to community draws on concern for others.” In the belief that more can and should be done to foster the spirit of free inquiry and commitment to community, we propose that this day in February each year be dedicated to campus-wide consideration of invisible and visible practices that can create or disrupt community. Interrupting the usual academic schedule makes a powerful statement about Williams’ commitment to addressing these issues.  Not only does it provide a focused opportunity to bring together the entire campus, it also sends a message to the outside community and has proven itself a catalyst for positive change in a variety of ways (see “Reasons to support the motion” item 8 below).

Because the faculty governs the College calendar, this proposal to incorporate Claiming Williams Day into each Spring semester requires a faculty vote. Yet Claiming Williams is not just a day: it comprises events, conversations, actions, and outcomes throughout the year that stem from the Claiming Williams mission. While these year-long events may continue regardless of the faculty vote on this motion, the importance of Claiming Williams Day in the effectiveness and impact of events throughout the year cannot be overstated. In our decentralized campus culture, Claiming Williams Day provides a focused opportunity to pause, come together, and interact around issues of importance to the College’s mission: “To serve well our students and the world, Williams embraces core values such as welcoming and supporting in the College community people from all segments of our increasingly diverse society…(W)e ask all our students to understand that an education at Williams should not be regarded as a privilege destined to create further privilege, but as a privilege that creates opportunities to serve society at large, and imposes the responsibility to do so.”

A steering committee comprised of students, staff, and faculty will oversee the design, organization, and execution of Claiming Williams, including those on Claiming Williams Day. The Associate Dean for Institutional Diversity (Prof. Carmen Whalen, 2010-2012) will facilitate this collaborative process, with logistical support from the Academic Program Coordinator in the Dean of Faculty office (Carrie Greene).

We realize that a single day is not sufficient to change habits and ways of thinking, but the magnitude of the day rests in its ability to engage the campus in an ongoing dialogue about multiple categories of difference and the social exclusion they unnecessarily uphold.

Reasons to support the motion to regularize Claiming Williams Day

  1. Claiming Williams Day provides an unusual opportunity for students, staff, and faculty who do not normally get together to meet, experience, and/or discuss issues of value to our community. In 2009 CW Day brought an estimated 1000 people (this is a conservative estimate of participation; 550 people attended author and activist Tim Wise’s talk alone); and in 2010 well over 1000 people participated (700 people attended “The Philosopher Kings” movie showings). This is a significant portion of our community of ~3000 (2050 students, 750 staff, 250 faculty).
  2. Claiming Williams Days offers a wide variety of high quality events addressing issues of community and diversity (the assessment of “high quality” comes from each post-CW survey). Keeping Claiming Williams “fresh,” an overt challenge made to the Claiming Williams Steering Committee for 2010, is not a problem. The numbers of participants, the richness of the events, the span of conversations, and the breadth of outcomes speak to the success in already creating two distinctive CW Days. Keeping CW “fresh” in the future is a goal attainable by the creative individuals and groups who comprise and support the CW Steering Committee. As both a day and a year-long process for building community, CW Day is responsive to and inclusive of community input.
  3. CW seeks out a wide range of community members to participate. Here, mechanisms for built-in responsiveness have served CW well, ranging from open invitations for community members to join the CW Steering Committee, to its successful public requests for proposals, to its immediate web-based survey for feedback, to its public sharing of survey results.  Survey feedback about CW Day 2009 led directly to articulating three requirements for all CW 2010 events (both on CW Day and throughout the year.  All CW 2010 events (1) addressed one or more aspect of the CW mission, (2) included a substantive piece that was interactive, ideally through dialog in small-group or moderated discussions, and (3) addressed issues at Williams College, moving beyond abstraction in order to focus on the College community’s issues. In short, CW has already demonstrated responsiveness to community interests, while retaining its basic mission.
  4. We think it important that voting faculty be sure to consider the positive impact that CW Days have had on staff inclusion at Williams. That is, although the future of CW Day rests on a faculty vote, CW Day impacts two large non-voting groups: students and staff. While faculty members generally take students into account in most everything at the college, the inclusion of staff in faculty considerations occurs less regularly. Unlike Mountain Day or Winter Carnival, Claiming Williams Day pointedly and concertedly includes staff. All staff units have worked hard to make clear that interested staff members are encouraged to participate in CW Day, but that this is a choice without expectation. Flexibility to arrange release time on CW Day has been applied across the campus, with Dining Services taking a lead in creative planning that allows workers time to participate.
  5. The large number of volunteers among students, faculty, and staff who planned and executed the events of each CW Day provides a separate measure of enthusiasm for Claiming Williams Day. In 2010 alone, 16 students, staff, and faculty members served on the CW Steering Committee; collaborations among dozens of individuals resulted in the submission of 22 event proposals for CW Day and 13 event proposals for events throughout the rest of the year; dozens of additional individuals orchestrated and staffed events on CW Day and throughout the year.
  6. Claiming Williams aligns with the college’s curricular goals embedded in the Exploring Diversity Initiatives requirement, by encouraging students, faculty, and staff together to engage the questions and issues that confound us as citizens of a global society. The start of classes is an optimal time for integrating conversation and consideration into this educational goal. Claiming Williams provides discourse and activities that better prepare students to enter diverse professional arenas.
  7. The mission of Claiming Williams aligns with the College’s Mission and Purposes in multiple ways (http://www.williams.edu/home/mission.php):
    • “…free inquiry requires open-mindedness, and commitment to community draws on concern for others.”
    • “To serve well our students and the world, Williams embraces core values such as welcoming and supporting in the College community people from all segments of our increasingly diverse society…”
    • “… we ask all our students to understand that an education at Williams should not be regarded as a privilege destined to create further privilege, but as a privilege that creates opportunities to serve society at large, and imposes the responsibility to do so.
    • At the same time, being itself privileged by its history and circumstances, Williams understands its own responsibility to contribute by thought and example to the world of higher education.”
  8. Well beyond the immediate impacts of CW Day itself, the value of CW Day can be measured by the outcomes it catalyzes. Many of these outcomes are private, shared only between individuals or among small groups in which intersecting issues of identity and belongingness bump up against building an inclusive learning community. But here are some of the known outcomes of CW 2010 are public, and they illustrate CW Day’s potential to effect positive change:
    • A new course, “History of Whiteness in the United States” (HIST 383(F)), will be offered by Prof. Leslie Brown. This course is a direct outcome of conversations held at the Town Hall Forum on CW Day 2010.
    • Students in “New Poetry” (ENGL 133) studied Lenelle Moise’s CW performance.
    • A student leadership alliance is being built to bridge oft-mentioned gaps between athletes and non-athletes, and between Minority Coalition (MinCo) and non-MinCo group members.
    • Collaboration between Health Services, Athletics, the Dean of the College’s office, and the Multicultural Center will bring team captains and Junior Advisors together to discuss white identity and how to be an ally for students of color.
    • A licensed social worker has come to campus to facilitate discussions on student life issues with students who have petitioned the College to hire a minority counselor in Health Services.
    • Claiming Williams events occurred throughout the academic year. These included a campus visit by football legend Jim Brown, “Eyes on the Prize” film series and discussions at Images Cinema, campus visit and discussions with political theorist Dr. Juliet Hooker ‘94, public showing and discussion of the movie “Crash”, and multiple campus showings, and student, faculty, and staff discussions of the research film “In Our Own Words: Williams Student Experiences.”
    • Several groups have incorporated Claiming Williams events into their own professional and leadership development:
    • 65 custodial staff members watched and discussed “The Philosopher Kings” prior to Claiming Williams Day; they also watched and discussed the film “In Our Own Words: Williams Student Experiences” as part of their March training day.
    • All student orientation leaders (JAs, EphVentures (e.g., WOOLF, Bridges)) will be shown “The Philosopher Kings” during spring leadership training in May.

Claiming Williams Mission Statement

Claiming Williams invites the community to acknowledge and understand the uncomfortable reality that not all students, staff, and faculty can equally “claim” Williams. By challenging the effects of the College’s history of inequality that are based on privileges of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion, we will provoke individual, institutional, and cultural change.

Revised April 20, 2010